At one end of the political spectrum there were the diehard conservatives, both rich and poor, some of them later to become known as "ultras", who stubbornly resisted all change; at the other end, various kinds of liberals supporting reform of one sort or another. By the 1950s, these latter were reckoned to comprise twenty to twenty-five per cent of the overall population, loosely embracing the European professional classes; these figures also include the Muslim évolués and a large section of the Jewish community. But the liberals had little or no proletarian support. Many of the petits blancs were failed farmers who had gravitated towards the cities, and this in itself was to grant them a collective political consciousness not to be found among the more rural settlers of Morocco and Tunisia. Like the poor whites of Rhodesia, they could not afford to be liberal, but tended to be either Communist or reactionary; and, curiously enough, these two opposing forces were largely at one, at least where liberalisation for the Muslims was concerned, as has already been noted at the time of the Sétif uprising.

DEFINE: Clarifies the composition of the liberal faction in colonial Algeria, including European professionals, Muslim évolués, and part of the Jewish community.

Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Alge…, loc. 167